I don't like to play most Early Access games until they're released. So, despite being a proud backer, I only really played for the first time yesterday. I only have an hour or so played, but I've really enjoyed what I've experienced so far.

I do have a question for those who've played longer. Is there a description of each stat in the game? Intuitively, I understand that Strength affects melee attacks and Vision obviously helps you see further. But, how important is Dexterity to a caberjack? Do hunters need Strength at all? Is Intuition only useful to saigewrights? Is this information in the game, or does it get tutorialized later? (My game time has only gone 50 years or so. My first heroes are starting to die off.)

I'm considering starting over with iron mode turned on, too. Should I wait until I've played through the game, first?

So far, the game has been really fun, and I'm looking forward to really seeing how it unfolds.

I played for 2-3 hours and I honestly kind of quit worrying about those stats and focused more on the traits? I don't know. I'm not taking the game seriously and definitely don't want to play on a harder difficulty - I'm more just playing through once and seeing what happens. I haven't played a TON of tactical games with permadeath, but this one seems to rely on you losing people rather often, thus I don't want to get caught up too much in stats.

Edit: I also just realized that the chalice on the game's cover art does not match the faces within the actual game. Unless those are randomized? But they can't be with so much voice work, right?

When I played the earliest build they released a while back, the ONLY stat that mattered in the long run was fertility. I'm sure they've balanced things by now, and my advice comes with a huge grain of salt in that I have no idea how much of the game has changed. But still, to hell with the individual stats, get those lusty studs busy building an army for you. A giant, fertile, horny army.

I think dexterity affects the chance to hit your target, and iirc I read in a tip that intelligence increases the damage of the Alchemist flasks, but I might be mistaken. Intuition is as you suspect only for sagewrights. Where each point increases the research speed by 1% (so that with a sum of 20 intuition, they would get 120% times as much work done as normally, meaning you are completing it in 5/6 the time). I read the intuition info on the official wiki (which is an awesome source of information, btw). Sadly, it doesn't have any info on the base stats yet :(

About the cover art, I think that it's outdated and is a relic from around their kickstarter campaign when no art had been finalized. The faces on the chalice are not randomized. If they made new cover art it would probably look like the splash art on massivechalice.com, or like the cover on their bandcamp soundtrack.

Thanks for the tips, guys. Since stats are tied to classes, I guess it doesn't matter too much. Characters come with their class pre-installed, so they're generally going to have the stats they need to get the job done. I'll probably just focus on traits, too.

How do researched items work? Like, if you research what I assume is a health potion, do I just have 1 health potion that I can use once, do I get 1 health potion item that I can give to a character that uses it once per fight, or does it unlock the ability to use potions for all my characters?

You can use the item in battle one time (for the most part), they are in everyones inventory.

Do I have to do anything with the people in "training" (under 15 years of age)? Do they just get automatically added to my pool of usable fighters when they the right age?

@lukeweizer: At the start you don't need to worry about them. They sit in training until 15 and then are moved to your hero pool. Later you can build a building that you can then promote a hero to, who will help train them better. That is the only thing you can do with them, is help advance the training.

Also just want to mention that my best hero so far has been one of the hybrid hunters. Erica "Two Eyes" Davis. Baller Time! She is a drunken hero that kills everything in one shot from crazy distance.

Hunter is definitely my favorite class. So much so that I haven't appointed any of them to a keep to breed a Hunter cross class. I think I'm about to fail my first game, so I'm definitely going to make a Sagewright and Standard building sooner in my next playthrough (whatever the buildings are actually called).

I've been having a LOT of luck with Boomstrikers (Alchemist + Hunter). Their flasks only do damage in a cross pattern (instead of a full square, like regular alchemists), but they do a bunch more damage, can learn Honed Hearing (which lets them "see" enemies through walls), and (I think) are more accurate. All this adds up to a character that can accurately lob bombs over walls onto groups of enemies that haven't even seen you yet, from stupidly long distances. And with upgraded weapons and/or relics, they can be doing like 30-40 or 50-60 damage per shot, one-shotting bulwarks and cradles.